I’m head down on getting Legends of Australian Fantasy and Wings of Fire completed. Legends is in final copyedits right now, while Wings is due in the hands of the publisher on 18 March. I also have several things lined up behind that already demanding my attention. On top of that, March is tax time for me, and then I’m disappearing for part of April for a long-awaited family holiday.
Still, I’ve been lax in my reportage here. Older projects like Eclipse Three have been receiving wonderful write-ups from the likes of Jeff VanderMeer, for which I’m hugely grateful, while new projects that were completed a while ago are starting to appear. The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four is just shipping as a write, and other projects are lining up behind it. Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle will be out soon, and it should be followed by Fritz Leiber: Essential Stories and Walter Jon Williams’ The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories. Immediately after those have all hit this shelves, my special issue of Subterranean should be online, and then Swords and Dark Magic should be out. They’ll be followed by Legends of Australian Fantasy and The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson for WorldCon in Melbourne, and then Eclipse Four for World Fantasy. I suspect The Best of Larry Niven should be out around then too. All of which shows I’ve been busy.
I’m also tinkering with travel plans for later in the year. I’m heading to Melbourne for WorldCon with the family (yay!) and may be going to World Fantasy in Columbus. I just bought a membership for the latter, but am very much undecided as to whether I’ll actually make it. We shall see.  There’s a lot more to mentin here – I hope to get it online over the next while. As always, my apologies for the silence.
Alisa Krasnostein and her Aus SpecFic posse have interviewed me for this year’s Snaphot round-up. You can read it here. I do sort of go on a bit, for which I apologise. It did bring home again the need for me to blog more. Sorry! Oh, and to read the many other far more interesting snapshots check these blogs daily:
No promises for better posting, but I will try. Has anyone else noticed a drop-off in the quality of Amazon’s packaging? I received books 5 & 6 of the Zelazny set yesterday, and one was damaged. Life other than that, is sort of good. I’m drowning in dragons, concerned about cyberpunk, and need to get year’s best reading done. But, holidays approach and I’m working on it all. Progress progress.
I did have a good recent family birthday – sister’s partner – and have been garderning (which is weird). Still reading about Hunters & Collectors, and not about SF, but that’s almost ready to change. Always more. Oh, we had mixed health news about Jessica. More tests to follow.
I think that’s the very potted synopsis. More later.
I hope that at some appropriate point in the future someone will publish The Collected Stories of Kage Baker. It would be a fine, rich and entertaining set of books. In the meantime, Subterranean Press have a new story, “The Bohemian Astrobleme”, on their website. Go read it, or go buy one of her books. The ‘Company’ novels are fun, but her fantasy novels are excellent, and she was a very fine short story writer.
I awoke this morning to the extremely sad news that Kage Baker has died. Sadly, I never really got to meet her. I read and reviewed her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, for Locus when it was published in 1997, and was in touch with her via email several times obtaining rights to stories to reprint in my year’s bests. I was also fortunate enough to be able to solicit two fine stories, “Maelstrom” (The New Space Opera 2) and the yet-to-be-published “Attlee and the Long Walk” (Life on Mars). She was a fine writer, a delight to deal with, and I honestly thought I’d be buying and reading her stories for years to come. A sad day indeed. I think I might mark it by reading The Hotel Under the Sand with my eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. I don’t doubt Kage’s work will long out live her, but that doesn’t make this news any more welcome.
